She showed up at my hotel unannounced, and that night I paid the bill for her whole crew. It was the first of many red flags I ignored.

In 2024 I finally took my first proper trip to Thailand. I'm 34, from Lyon, and I'd been wanting to go for years, always putting it off for one reason or another, work, money, whatever excuse came up next to fill the gap.

Before flying out I started chatting to a few women on apps, because I wanted to experience a bit of everything, from meeting normal Thai women to seeing what the bar scene everyone talks about on travel forums was actually like in person. Looking back, I probably wanted to take on more than I should have for a first timer, rather than easing into it the way a friend who'd already been a few times kept telling me to, more than once, that there was no rush to do it all in one trip.

With two women in particular the conversation went well beyond the usual polite back and forth of those first few weeks. One was called Mook and owned a bar in Patong, something she mentioned proudly almost in the first message. The other, Bua, worked in a massage shop a few streets from my hotel and wrote a lot less, but when she did it felt like genuine interest in the conversation, not just confirming what time my flight landed.

I still remember one of Mook's early messages, while I was still in France, asking if I'd come to her bar "like every farang who goes to Patong," a line that felt charming at the time and, in hindsight, already said quite a bit about how she saw us before we'd even met in person.

My first day in Phuket I went to see Bua. We got on brilliantly from the start, nothing forced, just two people talking easily while she worked and I waited my turn reading signs I couldn't understand. We spent a couple of hours together, first at the shop and then getting a drink nearby, laughing about how little Thai I knew, and it was a far better start to the trip than I'd imagined on the flight over.

When I came out of the bar where we'd been having that drink, I found a stack of missed calls from Mook. She'd turned up at my hotel without us ever arranging a time, sitting on a sofa in the lobby with her phone in hand, waiting as if showing up unannounced was the most normal thing in the world.

That evening she took me out to dinner with her friends, then on to another bar near hers. She ordered drinks, shots and food for the whole group without asking me once, seafood, buckets of beer, more shots when it looked like nobody even wanted them, and by the end of the night I was the one paying the entire bill without anyone even framing it as a question. Nobody in the group seemed remotely surprised. One of her friends even told me, half joking, half not, "you're very generous," while Mook ordered another round of shots without so much as glancing over to see if I was okay with it.

For any first timer it's easy to wave that red flag off. You tell yourself, I'm on holiday, who cares about one night.

The next few days were exactly the same. Every restaurant Mook picked was the most expensive in the area, always with a sea view or some decoration clearly chosen for photos. She'd order four or five dishes while I ordered one, take carefully arranged photos of them for her social media, barely touch any of it, and leave most of it when the plates got cleared. Even a fruit smoothie cost 300 baht at a place where I'd been paying around 60 everywhere else for the same thing, often better made. It genuinely felt like she was using me to fund her lifestyle rather than to get to know me.

I started to understand, too late, the difference between a bar girl honestly working shifts pouring drinks and someone who's turned every dinner, every day trip and every motorbike ride into a parallel income stream. I've got no issue with the former. The latter is exhausting in a very specific way, because you never quite know at what point you stop being someone she's spending time with and become little more than a wallet with legs attached.

She did eventually take me to a couple of the places she'd promised from day one, a viewpoint over the whole bay and a waterfall I'd seen photos of before flying out. But even then, the moment we finished, she asked me for 500 baht for petrol for the bike she'd used to get us there, as if it had been part of the plan all along. By that point I was pretty much ready to say our goodbyes without thinking twice about it.

Then I got properly sick with a fever for about three days, stuck in the hotel room drinking water, taking paracetamol and watching Thai TV without understanding a word of it. Mook messaged a couple of times asking if I was okay, without ever offering to come by. Once I felt a bit better, we spent another day together, mostly because she'd been fairly insistent about seeing me before I recovered fully. Nothing had changed. She was still ordering the most expensive thing on the menu while I, still weak and with barely any appetite, kept things simple and light.

The final straw came a few days later, when she messaged me on Line asking for 2,500 baht because, according to her, I hadn't spent enough in her bar and she couldn't cover the pool table rental that week. I reminded her, with what patience I had left, that we'd only ever agreed I'd visit her bar once, and that on top of that I'd been ill for several days straight rather than out spending money on anything. When I refused, she told me she wanted nothing more to do with me. Fine by me, honestly, though it took me a couple of days to stop replaying the whole exchange in my head, wondering how I hadn't seen it sooner.

I'd already booked a day trip to an island for the two of us before any of this happened, so instead I invited Bua to come along. She said yes almost instantly.

We had an amazing day together, sun, beach, a nearly empty boat since it was a weekday, snorkelling in water so clear you could see the fish from the deck, none of the tension of the previous days with Mook hanging over any of it. We ate whatever we felt like, split the bill without either of us making it a thing, and for the first time on the trip I felt like I was actually on holiday. When we got back to the hotel that evening, I found a flood of angry messages from Mook waiting on my phone, one after another, each one more in caps than the last.

Turned out the tour company had accidentally sent her a photo of me and Bua together on the boat, no fault of theirs at all, simply because we'd used Bua's number to book the trip originally, back when the plan had still been to go with Mook before things fell apart. She completely lost it, accusing me of things that barely made sense, mixing insults in Thai and English in the same message. I blocked her without replying to any of it and carried on with my trip as if none of it had happened.

Thankfully that one bad experience didn't ruin the holiday, not even close. I met plenty more people in Thailand after that, genuine, polite, who never expected anything from me beyond a good time, including a family who invited me to eat at a night market simply because they found it funny watching me try to order in Thai with my phone in hand. Bua and I kept seeing each other for the rest of the trip, without the constant tension of working out who was paying for what, and saying goodbye to her at the airport was harder than I expected for someone I'd only known two weeks.

The biggest lesson I took from all of this is not to tell people it's your first trip to Thailand, or your first time back in years. Some people assume you don't know the prices or how things work and act accordingly from the very first moment, while others, most people really, don't change how they treat you in the slightest.

Despite everything, I fell completely in love with Thailand, and I know for a fact I'll be back, probably sooner than I think. Next time, though, I'll be a lot more careful about who I choose to spend my time with, and especially about who I tell how many times I've been before, and how much I already know about what things actually cost.